On Feb 24th, 2020, Nevada @GovSisolak signed an order restricting the use of anti-malaria drug #hydrocholoroquine for coronavirus treatment to inpatient settings only. Right-wing Twitter accounts quickly began misrepresenting this order as an outright ban.
cc: @ZellaQuixote
cc: @ZellaQuixote
To study the spread of the "Sisolak bans hydrochloroquine" narrative, we downloaded tweets containing at least one word from each list (plurals etc included):
- malaria, malarial, chloroquine, hydrochloroquine,
- nevada, sisolak, governor
- ban, bar, forbid, outlaw, "not allow"
- malaria, malarial, chloroquine, hydrochloroquine,
- nevada, sisolak, governor
- ban, bar, forbid, outlaw, "not allow"
Sisolak announced the order restricting the use of #hydrocholoquine on Twitter at 3:49 PDT on 3/24. Tweets misrepresenting it as a "ban" began appearing 21 minutes later, possibly fueled by the Las Vegas Sun using similar verbiage in its headline (which has since been corrected.)
It didn't take long for high-profile #MAGA accounts to join in and spread the false claim that Sisolak had outright banned chloroquine for COVID-19 patients far and wide, with @charliekirk11 and @RyanAFournier leading the pack.
Most of the media sources linked from tweets misrepresenting @GovSisolak's order are of the right-wing conspiracy variety. The main exception is the aforementioned Las Vegas Sun, possibly due to the presence of the misleading claim in the original headline.
Finally, what hashtags show up in tweets claiming that @GovSisolak banned the use of hydrochloroquine to treat coronavirus patients? #coronavirus is unsurprisingly the most frequent hashtag, but a multitude of anti-Democrat and anti-China hashtags turn as well.
*footnote - hydroxychloroquine is misspelled as "hydrochloroquine" several times in this thread; the underlying dataset includes tweets containing both the correct and incorrect spellings.
